Archive for December 9th, 2014

Recently one visited the Hunters Point Avenue Bridge, which spans the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek in Long Island City’s Degnon Terminal. It was low tide. The smell was abominable.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The tidal evacuation of the liquid during an unusually low winter tide –and we will just refer to that hellish chemical compound which sloshes about and between the shattered bulkheads of Dutch Kills as “water” – had revealed the hateful ooze and depraved sediments which underlie and poison the canal.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Gaze into the Black Mayonnaise, lords and ladies of Newtown. An amalgamation of centuries of sewage and oil and industrial pollution, as concentrated into a hard jelly that extends from twenty to thirty feet down from the surface. The wind was rather still, this day that the sediment mounds rose, and Dutch Kills exuded its peculiar flavor profile.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The smell back here isn’t necessarily that of sewage, which has a distinctive and quite unique odor, this scent is also biological. The ambient aroma is that of sewage that’s been allowed to simmer, that is. These sediment mounds are teeming with armies of mephitic entities – most of whom could be politely described as “pathogens” – and when the “water” pulls out, they all fart at once and it smells not unlike rotting egg salad sandwiches.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The odor is best described as a flavor, as it activates a region far back on the tongue in addition to the nasal passage, which autonomically causes the abdomen to tighten up as well as causing vocalizations of some sort. The vocalizations are either profane or invoke the name of a god. To one such as myself, it is nepenthe, of course.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This century old point of view, of the former Loose Wiles Bakery at the Degnon Terminal in Long Island City, is about to be inextricably altered. A multi million dollar upgrade to the building, which serves as the modern day “Building C” of LaGuardia Community College, will be wiping away the intricate but crumbling plaster facade which has been so long familiar.